Thursday, 21 April 2016

Attendance of meetings related with the developing topic

Well, in this post I will just talk about some activities that I've attended here at UPC that were related with topic of my project.

In the past month of March, two different but compelling meetings occurred here in Barcelona where the thematic of Structural Health Monitoring was heavily discussed.

The first one was a summit organised by IABSE and the Finnish Association of Civil Engineers with the title of Global Risks in Structural Engineering. This was a two day event (10-11 March 2016) where the first day was held at Helsinki and the second one here at UPC, Barcelona. Here, different and engaging presentations were made by notable keynoters.

As the title of this summit suggests its topic was focused on risk assessment and evaluation of civil engineering structures subjected to natural hazards. The presentations ranged from new risk-based wind design methods for bridges, probabilistic seismic risk evaluation of urban areas, damage modes of concrete structures in major earthquakes and state-of-the art and proposal of infrastructure for disaster hazards.

Here you can see two photos of the summit where unfortunately I was blocked on both of them... But since there aren't any better ones, I guess these will do just fine.

Well, anyway. It was definitely a productive meeting where interesting and relevant topics were examined, related with theme of the project that I'm developing and that has been discussed in this blog on the previous posts.

The second meeting was related with the COST Action TU1402. For those of you that like me didn't knew what a cost action is, it's basically an European Concerted Research Action that focus on a relevant field. You can find more about these actions in here.

This specific action has the objective of Quantifying the value of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) by means of improving decision basis for design, operation and life-cycle integrity management of structures.

This action is involved with several other COST actions, other European projects and even a different Marie Curie Network (SmartEn).

This was a fascinating meeting since different SHM applications where presented and in which not only its relevance for the maintenance of the structure was debated but also the quantification of the procedure of implementing each SHM application and its value for the monitored structure. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to obtain photos of this meeting but you can see and read its presentations here.

In the future, I hope I'll be able to attend more of these meetings since it allows me to easily witness what have been the latest achievements in research related with the topic that I'm currently working on and also since it's a great way to network and interact with fellow researchers that, ultimately, can greatly contribute to the quality of my work.